You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones. And today to discuss

the history of diabetes treatments from insulin to OZempic and the all too human scientists who

discovered them and the companies that profit from them, I'm joined by Liam Shaw,

an evolutionary biologist at Bristol University and the author of Dangerous Miracle,

a history of antibiotics.

Liam's piece in the latest issue of the LRP is a review of the latest edition of Michael Bliss's

classic book, The Discovery of Insulin. Hello Liam and thank you for talking with me again.

Hello, Tom.

So diabetes or type 1 diabetes has been recognised as a fatal condition for thousands of years.

As you write in your piece, it's described in ancient Chinese, Sanskrit and Greek texts.

But it wasn't until the late 19th century that the cause of it began to be understood.

Is that right?

That's right.

So people had known for a long time that there was

this sort of strange condition where sufferers would urinate a lot and their urine would be sweet.

And people kind of suggested that there was possibly some connection between what you were eating and what was going on,

because it was as if their bodies couldn't process the food that they were eating,

and the sugar was just being voided in their urine.

But in the late 19th century, researchers showed that you could actually give a dog diabetes by removing parts of its pancreas.

So you could sort of produce the condition.

And then you could, by putting fragments of the pancreas back in, you could alleviate it.

So it was clear that there was something that the pancreas had in it that could reduce diabetes.

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